No, That Super Bowl Commercial Wasn't a Personal Swipe at Dairy Farmers
We all saw it. That Super Bowl commercial for some company we’d never even heard of, using “chunky milk” to get its point across. Which I’m not sure it did, because the whole thing was confusing and absurd, but here we are. Minutes later, Facebook was flooded with dairy farmer outrage, calling for “blowing up Mint’s inbox”, leaving negative reviews (despite the fact that they’ve never used the product), calls to “share this commercial so everyone knows how bad it is!”
OK guys. Really? Number one, have you ever heard of the Streisand Effect? If not, here you go: “The Streisand effect is a phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the internet.”
By sharing that stupid commercial, you’re giving free publicity to that company. Pretty sure that’s the opposite effect you were wanting while you were busy yelling how mad you were IN ALL CAPS. Number two, do you REALLY think that our consumers are so dumb that they don’t know that pretty much the milk they buy, have been buying for all these years, isn’t chunky? That suddenly it’s going to make a bunch of nut juice drinkers out of them? Come on. People who drink milk will continue to do so, with good faith that the FDA, USDA, grocery stores, etc are all doing what they do to make sure they don’t end up with chunky milk. And let’s be honest, when chunky milk does occur, it’s because the consumer themself left it too long in the fridge. Can we have a little faith in the people who buy our products? Because well…..they buy our products.
This was not a personal swipe at dairy farmers. While I’ve not contacted Mint to ask them personally, I’m going to take a wild guess here and say that they didn’t give the slightest thought to American dairy farms when the marketing people came up with this ad. They were looking for a way to parallel the story they were trying to tell, and unfortunately, it was our turn to get caught up in the debris. I agree, this was a poor commercial, especially for the quality and entertainment we expect from a Super Bowl ad. But please for the love of all things creamy, stop being enraged by this.
Know what would be better? If we could find ways to spend our promotion dollars more effectively. If you talked to the mom at the grocery store (nicely!) about how glad you are that she chose to put Go-Gurts in her cart instead of whatever the weirdos in the lab have decided to culture in a petri dish have masquerading as food.
Seriously, we’re better than this. This reaction, right here, is why the dairy industry has the major issues it does with consumers, processors, and all our supporting industries that we do. Being proactive, not reactive, is where we need to start.